Heat; Ossified

By Dana Thomas

Published: February 20, 2000

''Fashion isn't just clothes,'' Ossie Clark, the flamboyant British designer, once remarked. ''It's what's happening at the moment in everything.'' Especially if the clothes, like Clark's, embody everything cool about the moment, which in his case was 60's London: the art, the music, the photography, the films, the politics. They offer such a shorthand for the archetype of hip that today's designers -- Miuccia Prada, Tom Ford, Stella McCartney, Christian Lacroix, Emanuel Ungaro, Valentino, Narciso Rodriguez -- have all cribbed from Clark this spring: slinky, bias-cut dresses in pretty print chiffons; tailored suits with skinny, flared trousers; and torso-hugging snakeskin jackets.

Hollywood's young elite is catching on, too. Nicole Kidman owns several original Ossies, and Peta Wilson, who slipped on her black crepe Ossie cocktail dress with ''black satin sash down to your feet'' for her 29th birthday party, says with a laugh, ''A designer tried to buy it off my back!'' Original Ossie Clark creations, in prints by his wife, the textile designer Celia Birtwell, now command around $1,500 in vintage shops and sell at auction in London for hundreds of pounds. The Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, in Warrington, England, Clark's hometown, is featuring a Clark retrospective until April 29. And this month, Cameron Silver, who owns the hip Los Angeles vintage store Decades, will showcase Clark's designs, while his neighbor, the Jenny Armit gallery, will display Birtwell's textiles. The show will also be on view on Decadesinc.com.

Sadly, Clark himself isn't enjoying his renaissance. Three years ago, at the age of 54, he was fatally stabbed 37 times in his apartment by his drug-addled lover, Diego Cogolato, a 28-year-old Italian drifter whom Clark picked up 18 months earlier in nearby Holland Park. Though it was a tragic and violent death, it seemed somehow apt. Ossie Clark lived life ''without boundaries,'' more than one of his friends told me, and that was eventually his undoing. However, for the decade that London was the center of the cultural universe, the wildly hedonistic Clark was its top designer. He dressed Julie Christie, Brigitte Bardot, Anita Pallenberg when she was dating Keith Richards, Britt Ekland when she was married to Peter Sellers, and Penelope Tree when she was with David Bailey (who photographed Clark with the model Chrissie Shrimpton for British Vogue). He was painted by David Hockney, vacationed with the Rolling Stones, sat the Beatles in the front row of his shows and put their wives on his catwalk. His world was intoxicating -- a rush -- and his designs a mirror of it.

Since then, designers have tried to recreate what Clark did. They pack their front rows with celebrities, dress pop stars for the stage and clothe movie stars for premieres. But it's all orchestrated by an army of staff. These designers are perpetually on the outside looking in. ''I hear designers buy the old pieces and pull them apart,'' Birtwell told me. But no matter how much they study his seams and stitches, they will never recreate Clark's magic. For him, fashion wasn't a business. It was simply a way to make his friends the loveliest creatures on the planet.

Raymond Clark was born during an air raid in Liverpool on June 9, 1942, the youngest of six children. ''He's got great fists,'' the obstetrician legendarily remarked. ''He's going to do something with those hands.'' Soon after, the Clarks were evacuated to the town of Oswaldtwistle. When he was 7, they moved to government housing in Warrington, where young Raymond was teased for his sharp accent. ''You're a real Ossie,'' the kids would say.

Except for geometry and art, Clark was a poor student who preferred to draw and sew clothes for his dolls. At 16, he entered the Manchester Regional Art College and hooked up with a clan of trendy artistic types, including Jenny Dearden, a longtime friend; the actor Ben Kingsley; and Birtwell, then a textiles student whom he described as ''the most enchanting creature.'' After three years, Clark boasted: ''I'd got it. I could dream a dress and make it real.''

In 1962, Clark won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, where he met David Hockney, a fellow student. In 1964, Clark moved in with Birtwell, and despite his later homosexual liaisons, they began a love affair that would consume him to the day he died. That year was pivotal for Clark: he acknowledged his homosexual side by seducing Hockney, and together, they traveled to the United States, where Hockney introduced Clark to the glamorous life of Hollywood. Clark returned to London with a cache of Pop Art materials and a head full of ideas. For his graduation show, he produced a coat with a collar of colorful blinking lights. It was such a hit that he graduated with honors and made local headlines. To work he went, with Birtwell at his side. ''Ossie would say, 'Do what you want,' ''Birtwell recalled. ''So I drew figures onto the fabrics and took them to his studio. He'd choose what he wanted. It was an instinctive relationship -- there's no one else I could work with like that.''